I think that original Hebrew word covers just about any soaring bird of prey. So, according to my vague knowledge, hawk, eagle and vulture could be used interchangeably.
I think John Hamlet’s Birds of Prey of the World covers all these details and many others about birds of prey in History.
Besides goats and iguanas, many, many birds usually eat many kinds of berries that would be deadly to us, but they eat them as if they were candy.
That’s useful, I will have to look that book up! I’ve always assumed that without optics people could not always tell what exact species they were looking at (I can’t always tell with optics, but let’s imagine they were better at it that I am), so many of the terms must be vague. Plus they surely did not classify the same way we do!
My main source for this is my edition of Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB to students), which is the standard scholarly lexicon. BDB translates “nesher” as "(perhaps not always) the griffon-vulture ". And I know it’s in another dictionary I have, probably stated with more confidence, which alas is packed in boxes in my garage at the moment so I can’t just look it up. There may be more recently scholarship on the subject, but certainly around 15 years ago this was a common identification. (And surprisingly specific compared to most of the other birds mentioned, which could indicate it is a very confident ID, or it could be cause for suspicion. Translation is like this.)
…I just don’t generally go into that level of detail because people’s eyes tend to glaze over. 
At the very least, it seems reasonably sure that people in that part of the world did not neatly separately eagles from vultures in the same way that people do in North America today, if for no other reason than because the differences would not always have been as obvious. To my eye, Old World Vultures look more like eagles than New World Vultures do. Of course they are totally unrelated groups of vultures. But you don’t want to go into convergent evolution in a sermon unless you arereally sure of your audience.
Of course, it seems quite reasonable that ‘‘nesher’’ means griffon, since that was very likely to be ‘‘nesher’’ most of the time they needed to use that word. I don’t think they actually cared about telling eagles from vultures apart (although eagles were more likely to eat their livestock), and indeed, accipitrine vultures are similar to eagles when seen from far away.
I’ve heard that shrews have extremely fast metabolisms and thus, they are very sensitive to stress. Anything that can scare them a bit could kill them of a heart attack.
Man, that seems like a good excuse to try re-negotiating the Worker’s Comp plan…
There are none as far as I know that can inject venom (from spurs or otherwise), but there are several bird species that can sequester toxins in various parts of their bodies (e.g. the pitohui from New Ginuea which accumulates batrachotoxin in its skin and feathers, similar to some species of poison dart frogs). It is not so potent as to kill a human just by contact, but it could potentially cause burning and irritation if handled without protection.
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